The DIY Daredevil Who Films With Sharks

Cameraman Andy Brandy Casagrande builds his own rigs and films fearlessly to capture shark shots no one else can.

Andy Casagrande had dreamed of swimming with sharks ever since he was a kid growing up in a small town near Pittsburgh. He finally got his chance in 2005. Armed with nothing but a Sony Handycam in a DIY waterproof case and his own nerve, Casagrande slipped over the side of a boat and into the waters known as Shark Alley, off South Africa's Western Cape province.

Within seconds Casagande's dream was coming all too true: A great white shark came gliding toward him. The sleek, 4000-pound beast slid past, close enough to touch. Casagrande calls the moment "surreal," but it was more than that. "The biggest struggle is the mental battle," he says. "You're looking at a prehistoric predator, and everything in your body tells you to flee. But you just need to Zen out, slow down your breathing. Never swim away: If you act like prey they'll treat you like prey—chase you, catch you, and eat you."

The shark turned and made another pass. Then another. Casagrande was winning the mental battle. His breathing remained slow and regular. He began to relax. "When the shark made the third close pass and didn't eat me, I figured we were cool."

His full and proper name is Andy Brandy Casagrande IV, an unusual moniker that befits an unusually talented person. His camera work for the National Geographic series Great Migrations won him the 2011 Emmy Award for Outstanding Cinematography—Nature. But his defining work is his innovative—and, frankly, harrowing—filming for Shark Week, the Discovery Channel's annual programming extravaganza featuring shows such as Into the Shark Bite and Impossible Shot.

Casagrande has become a sort of poster boy for Shark Week. What sets him apart is his hacker ethos and methodology, which he has been honing since the day, more than a decade ago, that he made a waterproof housing for a video camera, attached it to a telescoping mop handle, and dangled it over the side of a boat to get eye-level footage of great whites. Among the dozens of other rigs he's invented and handcrafted since then is the bite cam, which snapped the now iconic closeup of a shark's gaping, razor-toothed jaws.

His tinkering continues to evolve and has gone high-tech. For a 2012 episode of Impossible Shot, for instance, Casagrande captured the first-ever "seagull's perspective" (his words) of a breach by a great white, using a rig with a 3000-frame-per-second camera carried aloft by a massive helium balloon tethered to the photographer's boat; the shark attacks a seal-shaped decoy positioned below the camera and thrusts skyward, 12-plus feet of fish getting airborne. For Shark Week this year he created a fin cam—essentially a GoPro camera attached to a pair of barbecue tongs—to record the shark's point of view. All of this work (in addition to other wildlife footage he's taken with homemade rigs) places Casagrande at the forefront of the DIY adventure video genre. It's the stuff of millions of YouTube clips and has become a mainstay of extreme-sports TV.

"He's known as the shark guy, but his work is much more diverse than that," Travis Pynn, a GoPro engineer, says. "He's incredibly inventive and resourceful. He has unique vision."

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Casagrande, 35, designs and builds his rigs in the garage of his rambling two-story home on a quiet street in Naples, Fla., where he lives with his Swedish-born wife, Emma Walfridsson, 30. When I visit there earlier this year, the famous cameraman pops out of the front door and bellows, "Dude!"

Welcome to Andy Casagrande's world.

Eager to demonstrate how he makes a bite cam, he suggests a trip to the local Ace hardware for parts. (I assume he'll drive—surely an accomplished, high-energy guy like Casagrande would have a killer ride—but we end up in my Chrysler 300 rental. He doesn't own a car, getting around instead on an Electra Townie bicycle with balloon tires.) "Basically," he says, "I go to the plumbing department, or I go to a sporting goods store or Walmart, and I gather materials."

Today he's acquiring some plastic nuts and a length of rubber fuel line, both of which are pliable enough to prevent a shark from harming its mouth and teeth when biting the camera housing. "I like to protect the animals that give me my livelihood," Casagrande says.

His shopping list is short but our time at Ace grows long. Casagrande bounces around the store on fast-forward, picking up and inspecting a vast array of items, and providing a running narrative of what exotic contraptions he might build with them.

At the checkout, clerk Sandra Rainey lights up when she learns that Casagrande is a Shark Week cameraman. "I love it because it shows sharks for what they are," she says. "Don't mess with them; you're in their element." Then, with a wry smile and a nod toward Casagrande, she adds, "I think he's crazy, but somebody's got to do it." The bill for the nuts and the hose comes to $11.77.

Back at the house we enter his shop, which is like the laboratory of a mad wizard. There are cameras mounted on remote-control cars—using such MacGyver-esque materials as takeout sushi boxes and camouflage duct tape—which Casagrande deploys to get intimate shots of lions gorging on prey. There are tiny helicopters and wing cams for aerial shots. On one shelf sits the fin cam, which he designed to slip over a shark's dorsal fin. It has a flotation device and is secured via a dissolving fastener that releases the apparatus after about 24 hours. A VHF-tracking pinger locates the camera after it floats to the surface—and Casagrande collects it and the unprecedented footage it contains.

It's time to build the bite cam. Using a Stihl drill press, Casagrande bores a large hole in a pair of Styrofoam swim boards ($19.99 each at the Sports Authority), then four smaller holes for the plastic bolts that hold the boards together. Into the larger hole he inserts a foot-long length of 4-inch-diameter PVC pipe. Into each end of the pipe he places a GoPro Hero3 Black Edition camera ($400 apiece); the cameras are held in place by a length of Styrofoam tubing. Plexiglass discs glued to O-rings seal each end of the pipe. A protective rubber sleeve covers the tube. Stainless-steel cable is fed into the rubber fuel line, then wrapped around the PVC pipe, forming a loop for tethering to the boat. Voilà! A masterpiece of low-budget DIY engineering is born.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Emma gazes into a computer screen, editing footage of one of her husband's shark dives. The couple met while he was filming lions in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park in 2007. A hairstylist visiting from Sweden with girlfriends, Emma arrived unannounced at Casagrande's campsite. They hit it off and, after an international courtship, wed in 2010. In addition to editing, Emma works as her husband's still photographer and safety diver. But that's on hold for now—she's pregnant and expecting their first child.

Emma makes her way downstairs and takes a seat with us in the Ikea-outfitted living room. On the wall is a photo of the couple in a passionate lip-lock in front of a sandstone arch in Utah's Arches National Park. "I used to have pictures of Swedish supermodels on my wall," Casagrande says. "Then I married one."

She giggles and smiles, flattered but maybe a little embarrassed by her husband's praise. "He's fun and wild, but he's also very grounded," Emma says. "He's open to everything in life. With him, it's always work and it's always vacation."

The conversation takes on an earnest tone, and I realize that the couple shares not just a home, but also a mission. "The point of our work is to teach people more about sharks and other animals, so they'll care more about them—and the planet," Emma says.

"I have two motives while filming wildlife," Casagrande chimes in. "One is to film it while it's still here. Two is to show people that it's mind-blowingly beautiful. I do this for the millions of people who will never go to the Serengeti or the Arctic."

Nathaniel Welch

As a boy, Casagrande obsessed about sharks, rode horses and mountain bikes, played guitar, tinkered with engines, and competed on his high school wrestling team. He's still very fit—ripped, in fact—175 pounds packed onto a 5-foot-7-inch frame. "He was always very competitive, very focused," his father Dan Casagrande says. "You have to have balls to wrestle—it's just you and your opponent."

The kid with the shark fixation decided at an early age that he wanted to become a marine biologist. After briefly attending the Florida Institute of Technology in 1996, he transferred to the University of Pittsburgh and entered the Semester at Sea program, where he circumnavigated the globe and photographed wildlife nonstop. It was a formative experience, a hint of things to come.

In 2000 the itinerant student graduated from California State University, Long Beach, with straight A's and a degree in abnormal psychology. Casagrande then worked as a tech-support engineer at a data-mining company in Silicon Valley, and in his spare time he created a website with the photos and videos he'd shot during his semester at sea. He started researching great white sharks, learning as much as he could, feeding his boyhood passion. He even composed "The Great White Shark Song" and shot a video of it; the clip shows Casagrande singing underwater in a wetsuit, twanging a guitar: "If I was a great white, I wouldn't bite you/But I'd swim right next to you/And ask you, How do you do?"

That lighthearted ditty helped change Casagrande's life. In 2002, after two frustrating years behind a desk, he sent an MP3 file of the song, along with a job application, to the White Shark Trust, a research and conservation group in South Africa. After hearing the song, Michael Scholl, who was then head of the trust, offered Casagrande a position without even looking at his application. Scholl says Casagrande's passion for sharks, clearly shown in the song, mattered more than anything he could put on paper. At the trust Casagrande studied great whites and filmed their behavior, merging his twin passions for photography and sharks. "Andy showed an ability to adapt quickly to different situations," Scholl says. "He was always trying new rigs, new camera angles, new attachments."

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And, of course, he swam with the sharks. In fact, he was the first person in the program ever to do so, in 2005. That same year a crew from the National Geographic Society arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, to film a documentary on great white shark research, including that of the White Shark Trust. When the head cameraman, Andy Mitchell, learned that Casagrande had swum outside the protective confines of a shark cage, Mitchell hired him as an assistant. On their second shoot together they were both swimming with the sharks. Mitchell admits that he was "scared to death."

Now a freelance cameraman and producer based in Vermont, Mitchell recalls being impressed by Casagrande's inventiveness. "He probably has the steepest learning curve of anyone I've worked with," Mitchell says. "He has pushed the boundaries of the gear and what it can do—building stuff, creating things, always tweaking. He became an A-list cameraman in a third of the time it usually takes."

Casagrande accomplished this feat, in part, by applying the GoPro DIY style and tech to wildlife photography. He may not have been the first person to do so, but he was early to the game and, arguably, has been the most successful.

Casagrande's collaboration with Mitchell led National Geographic to offer him a staff job in Washington, D.C., as a field producer and cameraman. He quickly became known as the gadget guy: "National Geographic wanted unorthodox ways to capture wildlife killing, mating, and migrating. So I made rigs that could get motion-controlled time-lapse footage, shots at night via infrared cameras—I made all sorts of stuff."

After seeing one of Casagrande's National Geographic documentaries in 2008, GoPro came calling and has been providing him with cameras ever since. "Andy's a GoPro fanatic because our cameras are tools that enable him to get shots he could never get before," Travis Pynn says. "Our cameras are small enough and cheap enough to put in a spot you wouldn't be able to justify with a more expensive camera."

This proved to be true in the Bahamas, where Casagrande's Shark Week shoot in March 2013 was a success: He managed to attach the fin cam to a tiger shark's dorsal fin, capturing hypnotic sequences.

Back in Naples with Emma, the couple has no time to rest. In the Casagrande home on a Sunday afternoon the clothes washer is churning, the dryer tumbling. While Emma is upstairs packing for a trip to Sweden to see her family, Casagrande is in his shop, organizing gear for a shoot in the South Pacific. The couple are leaving tomorrow on their trips.

Casagrande chatters away as he darts around the shop, selecting and packing equipment—and then unpacking and repacking it, again and again. "My kit has to be dialed in," he says. "My gear is my lifeline. It not only keeps me making a living, it literally keeps me alive, whether it's my underwater rebreather or my Red Epic camera housing. That can be handy for warding off a not-so-happy shark."

As he fusses with his stuff, Casagrande muses on how he went from being a little boy watching sharks on TV to an award-winning cameraman. "I dreamed of swimming with sharks," he says, "and now, I think, maybe I can inspire people to live the lives they dream."

If he falls short of his goal, well, he'll have to settle for being the gutsiest shark photographer ever.

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